A quote attributing it to Russian President Vladimir Putin is being widely shared on social media claiming that he recently described Pakistan as land just used as a cemetery for Pakistanis. This alleged statement from Vladimir Putin talks about how rich citizens in Pakistan utilise their land only for cemetery purposes. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: Russian President Vladimir Putin called Pakistan a land just used as a cemetery for Pakistanis.
Fact: Vladimir Putin did not make any such statement about Pakistan. When a similar quote with the text, “Africa is just a cemetery of Africans”, was attributed to Putin in 2018, the Ministry of Ghana through a Facebook post clarified that the message was fake. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
When we searched to check whether Russian President Vladimir Putin had made any such statement on Pakistan, we could not find any such on-record or official statement from Vladimir Putin. If Vladimir Putin had made such a statement, several Pakistani news websites would have published articles reporting that information. But we could not find a single news report about this alleged statement. This fake statement of Putin is circulating on social media from at least 2018.
In 2018, a Facebook page named ‘Al Jazeera West Africa’ had posted another version of the same quote attributing to Putin. The text in this other version quote reads, “Africa is just a cemetery of Africans”.
When this version of the quote with Africa went viral on social media, the Ministry of Information – Ghana issued a clarification confirming that the Facebook page with the name ‘Al Jazeera West Africa’ is a fake one. Several African fact-checking websites published articles reporting this information.
To sum it up, Russian President Vladimir Putin did not call Pakistan just a cemetery for Pakistan citizens.
